


The Girl From The Cabin

by the_crownless_queen



Series: girls like wolves [1]
Category: Timeless (TV 2016)
Genre: Gen, and I am clearly not over the finale, because I have Emma feels
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-25
Updated: 2017-02-25
Packaged: 2018-09-26 21:33:08
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,484
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9922982
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/the_crownless_queen/pseuds/the_crownless_queen
Summary: Emma grows up hearing whispers of the great work she'll accomplish one day, of the terrible things she'll do - because for Rittenhouse those are two sides of the same coin.





	

When Emma is five, one of her father’s friends kneels in front of her and pats her on the head. His suit is pristine and his smile is kind, but his eyes are cold as he asks her if she’d like to do great things one day.

Behind the man, her father is nodding, so Emma says _yes, she would_. The man chuckles, ruffles her hair and ducks into her father’s office.

This isn’t where it starts, but it’s close enough.

.

The thing about Rittenhouse is that you never know you’re part of it until you are in too deep to leave. They never lie, never truly hide what they are or what they do. Well, not more than is strictly necessary anyway.

There is a plan, Emma knows. An end goal, even though she isn’t privy to it yet.

“Soon,” her father tells her when she asks.

It’s their secret, these meetings he holds in his office every other month, and when she asks why her mother doesn’t know about it, he looks pained. Emma doesn’t ask again, and her father never answers.

_(it isn’t until years later, as she too wears the heavy cloak of her own web of deception, that she understands)_

.

We’re not evil, is how she would explain it if she ever had to. Or if we are, she would say, it’s a necessary evil.  Because strong and determined men have always ruled over the masses, and this is truly no different to that. They only on a different scale – a new scale, for a new age.

There is no regime that doesn’t have bloody hands it wishes to hide, after all.

_(on her TV, the enemy manages to choke out a few words through the blood that bubbles at his lips_

_“you can’t stop us, we’re everywhere,” he says, and Emma laughs until her stomach hurts, until her vision blurs)_

.

Emma was always clever with her words and cleverer with her fingers. Sometimes her teachers didn’t like that very much – nor did the other kids.

“Who’d want someone like you?” They jeered, like these were the Middle Ages still instead of the twenty-first century. Girls, they said, couldn’t be good with computers.

Emma smiled in their faces, lips stretched thin to hide her teeth, and laughed in their backs because really, what did they know about anything? She was going to be great, going to do great things.

She would be one of the greatest.

_(in her books, an old man told a wide-eyed boy “he did great thing – terrible, but great” and Emma fights off a shiver every time)_

.

She is recruited by Mason Industries almost immediately after she finishes her thesis. The man himself shows her the facilities, tells her ‘this is where we’ll change the world.”

Emma thinks back to the meetings her father held in secret and pretended she wasn’t spying on, and the way that man had once asked her “do you want to be great?”.

She knows this is it – this is her chance.

.

Working one the time machine is harder than anything else she’s ever done, but it’s also so rewarding. She’s helping create something new, something amazing, something most people barely dare to dream of.

When Mason tells her she’s to be one of the pilots, she nearly jumps for joy.

She finds a white envelope on her front porch that same evening. Inside is a list of dates and places – meetings, she realizes with a kind of dreadful excitement, that take place in the past.

She memorizes them and later she burns both message and envelope, watching as they slowly turn to ashes that she lets float away on the wind.

She’s not surprised when the next day Mason suggests she try aiming for the first date on her list, nor when all the trips that come after follow the same pattern.

_(it’s almost sad really – he’s Rittenhouse  and he doesn’t even know it yet – he will though_

_they all do, in the end)_

.

Emma kills her first man in 1897. He comes at her with a knife, leering, and she knows exactly what he wants to do to her. Mean haven’t changed that much in a century, and the thought is more funny than it has any right to be.

Her body reacts on its own, years of self-defense classes her father insisted on burned in her mind.

It is so very easy to take the weapon and turn it against his wielder, sharp metal sliding into soft flesh with ease. The blood is warm and slick and the man’s breathing grows wet as Emma twists the blade.

The blood makes her hand shine, and she stares at them until her team finds her. they never talk about it, but they look at her a little differently, after. When she comes home, another white envelope is waiting for her, looking as innocuous as the first.

For a second, she almost tempted to never open it.

She does though, in the end. Of course she does.

She isn’t just sent to meetings now, and the blood never quite seems to leave her hands after that, no matter how hard she tries to wash it off.

.

She never gives any report on what she does. She doesn’t need to – everything that she does has already happened, and even without that Mason is slowly dragging himself down the rabbit hole. It seems almost unconceivable for him to still be unaware of Rittenhouse’s existence, and yet he is.

Not for long now, though. Emma can feel a change coming – it’s in the air.

Her next mission only proves it: they give it to her in person. The man whose name she never learned but whose face is imprinted in her mind tells her, “We need you to disappear for a little while. Can you do that?”

His voice is kind but his eyes are cold, and Emma thinks of the family she’s built herself her. “Yes,” she replies, and she wishes it didn’t hurt quite this much, that it didn’t feel so much like giving up, like surrendering _(like losing)_.

Faking her death is easy compared to everything she’s already done however. It’s almost ironic, really, that in the end she only death that required no bloodshed on her part is her own.

.

Emma once read somewhere that the past was another country. Somehow, to her it had never seemed true before now, before she found herself hiding in the past, a lonely woman in the woods.

_(the trees howl some nights but Emma has never slept more soundly – she is the greater monster here)_

She misses so much from her time, technology most of all. What she had ran out of batteries ages ago, and brilliant though she is there isn’t much she can do about that.

She spends years there, in that little cabin, and every one of them feels more dreamlike than the last.

The Emma of the cabin, it seems, is both a lie and the truest version of herself she can be, and in the end, when the man who calls himself Garcia Flynn shows up, ready to drag her back through time as she had always known someone would, it is so very easy to pretend she hates Rittenhouse.

It might even be true too. Is it possible to believe in something you hate? It certainly seems so.

She tells Flynn that she did terrible things for Rittenhouse, and it is even true.

She says she grew tired of it, and that’s the true lie.

.

In another life, maybe, Emma thinks she could truly grow to like this surly man who started his own holy war and who asks her to do terrible things in the name of his cause. He’s determined and willing to do anything for what he believes in, and one day Emma will laugh at the way he thinks himself so different from the monsters he chases throughout time.

They too, after all, are willing to do whatever it takes to make their dream come true – just look at her, stuck in the past on the word of the man she’s only seen twice in her life.

.

One day, her next order will come in. Maybe it will be another white envelope left on her doorstep, or maybe it’ll be a stranger stopping her on the street in the twenties, telling her that she has to be ready.

Maybe she’ll see it coming or maybe she won’t. Right now, none of this matters however.

What does is this: she did terrible things in Rittenhouse’s name and now she’s doing the same for Garcia Flynn, and soon she’ll go back to the only family that ever mattered, and she’ll do whatever they ask of her, because that’s who she is.

It’s who she always was – no, who she was always meant to become.


End file.
